"The truth ...?" she said, her voice barely audible, "I'm the only one who knows the truth!
As she looked away from me and went back to gazing down at the estate, I could have kicked myself for being so stupid. Not that I'd meant to imply that I knew what she'd been through, but still... it was just so thoughtless, such a brainless thing to say.
I really was an idiot.
"Sorry, Tom," Lucy said.
I looked at her, not sure I'd heard her right. "What?"
"I know you didn't mean anything ... and I didn't mean to snap at you —"
"No, please," I said, "I'm the one who should be saying sorry. Not you. I just didn't think, you know ... I just opened my big stupid mouth and —"
"You haven't got a big stupid mouth."
I stared at her. She was smiling again.
"It's OK," she said. "All right?"
"OK."
"All right."
We went back to our silent gazing for a while, watching the lights, the sky, the stars in the darkness. I could hear the wind sighing in the night, and there were a few faint sounds drifting up from the estate — cars, voices, music — but, all in all, everything was still pretty quiet. And even the sounds that were breaking the silence didn't seem to have any menace to them.
They were just sounds.
"Does it make any difference?" I said quietly to Lucy.
She looked at me. "Does what make any difference?"
"All this stuff that iBoy's done ... or whoever it is that's doing it. You know, making O'Neil and Adebajo and the rest of them suffer ... I mean, does it make you feel any better?"
She didn't answer for a while, she just stared at me, and for a moment or two I thought she was going to say — "It's you, isn't it? It's you ... you're iBoy," — and I started to wonder how that would make me feel. Good? Embarrassed? Ashamed? Excited? And that made me wonder if perhaps, subconsciously, I wanted her to know that it was me, that I was iBoy, that I was her guardian angel...
"I don't know, Tom," she said sadly. "I really don't know if it makes any difference or not. I mean, yeah ... there's a bit of me that gets something good out of their suffering ... you know, I really want them to feel pain ... I want them to fucking hurt ... because they deserve it ... God, they deserve everything they fucking get ..." Her voice had lowered to an ice-cold whisper. "So, yeah, it makes a difference in that way. It gives me something that part of me really needs ..." She sighed. "But it never lasts very long. I mean, it's just not enough ... it can't be enough. It can't take anything away." She looked at me. "Nothing can take anything away."
"They'll always have done it..." I said quietly.
She nodded. "And whatever happens, nobody can change that."
As we sat there looking at each other, alone together in the boundless dark, I found myself thinking about an old Superman film that I'd seen on TV at Christmas. I'd only been half-watching the TV at the time, so I couldn't remember all that much about it, but there was a bit in the film where Superman's so busy saving the lives of other people that he doesn't have time to save the life of Lois Lane, the girl he loves. And when he finds out that she's dead, he gets so distraught that he flies up into the atmosphere and starts whizzing in circles around the Earth, and he flies so fast that somehow the Earth begins to slow down, and eventually it stops spinning altogether and begins to rotate in the opposite direction, making everything go back in time, allowing Superman to go back into the past and prevent Lois Lane from dying.
Which was all pretty ridiculous, of course.
But I couldn't help thinking that if only I could do that, if only I could go back in time ... well, then I really could change things for Lucy. I really could make everything all right again.
But I knew that was never going to happen. This was the real world, not a movie. And in the real world, no matter how impossible things might be, they're never quite impossible enough.
"What are you thinking about, Tom?" Lucy asked me.
"Nothing ..." I shrugged. "You know, just stuff ..."
She smiled. "There's a lot of stuff to think about, isn't there?"
"Yeah ..."
"And it's always ... I don't know. It's like it's never straightforward, is it? It's never just this or that. Do you know what I mean?"
"Yeah."
"There's always two sides to everything. You feel good about something, but you still feel bad. You like something about someone, but you don't want to like it." She looked thoughtfully at me. "Two sides, you see? Even the stuff we were talking about earlier, you know ... Tobey Maguire's cute, Kirsten Dunst's sexy ... I mean, that's OK — kissing and stuff, people looking sexy ... it's just kind of nice. But then there's the other side of it, the other side of sex — the bad side, the shit, the fucking awful things that people do ..." She shook her head. "I just don't get it, you know?"
"Yeah ..."
She sighed again. "And it's the same with people too ... you think you know them, you think you know exactly what they're like ..." She looked slowly at me. "But maybe you're wrong ... maybe you've always been wrong, and maybe this person who you thought you knew ... well, maybe they've got another side to them. A side you're not sure about."
"Right..." I said tentatively.
Lucy looked at me for a long moment, her eyes never leaving mine, and then she smiled. "Or maybe I'm wrong about that too?"
I smiled back at her. "Don't ask me. I haven't got the faintest idea what you're talking about."
"You never do, do you?"
"Never do what?"
She laughed, and I grinned at her, and then we just sat there in silence for a few moments, smiling at each other in the darkness ... and I knew in my heart that this was how it was supposed to be. This was everything I could ever want, everything there was to want.
This was it.
After a while, Lucy looked at her watch and said, "I'd better get going, Tom. Mum'll be back soon."
"OK."
We both got to our feet then, and as we stood there at the edge of the roof, looking out into the darkness, I remembered the last time I'd been up here — all on my own, with my hood up and my iSkin glowing ... a softly glowing figure, sitting cross-legged on a cold stone roof, thirty floors up ...
Like some kind of weird hooded Buddha ...
A skinny, glow-in-the-dark iBuddha.
Or maybe an iGargoyle.
It was so much better now.
Tom?" Lucy said.
I turned to her.
"Thanks," she said quietly, looking at me. "This has been a really wonderful night. I'll never forget it." She moved closer to me, put her hands to my face, and kissed me softly on the lips.
God, it felt good.
So perfect, so right...
It felt so good, I nearly fell off the roof.
"OK?" she whispered.
I couldn't speak. I couldn't even smile. It was all I could do just to breathe. Lucy moved her hand to my head and gently stroked my scar with her fingertips.
"It feels warm," she said quietly.
"Warm ..." I muttered.
She smiled at me. "Come on, we'd better go ... before you start drooling."
She held my hand as we walked back across the roof to the hatchway. I helped her down the ladder, then we held hands again as we went out through the doors, down the stairs, and along the corridor to her flat.
"Thanks again, Tom," she said. "That was really nice."